


The Deal

by battle_cat



Category: Trust (TV 2018)
Genre: Character Study, F/M, Infidelity, M/M, Mentions of miscarriage, Polyamory Negotiations, Regina POV, Sexual Content, sort of...they would definitely not call it that
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-14
Updated: 2020-12-14
Packaged: 2021-03-10 21:20:21
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,141
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28063836
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/battle_cat/pseuds/battle_cat
Summary: As long as they’ve been married, there have been things Regina has been perfectly content not to ask Leonardo about.This, it turns out, is not one of them.
Relationships: Leonardo/Primo Nizzuto, Leonardo/Regina (Trust)
Comments: 22
Kudos: 108





	The Deal

**Author's Note:**

> This one really makes more sense if you have read [Promises and Threats](https://archiveofourown.org/works/27293782/chapters/66685795) first, since it's basically an alternate POV of some of the events in that fic.

As long as they’ve been married, there have been things Regina has been perfectly content not to ask about. She doesn’t need to know where Leonardo goes or what he does when Salvatore sends him on errands. When he comes home with a wad of cash in his pocket she spends in on whatever they need to buy and doesn’t ask where it came from. When she finds flecks of blood on his shirt in the laundry hamper she scrubs it in cold water and doesn’t say a thing.

They’re good at this. She knows what not to ask about, and he knows what not to tell. Outside the carefully-drawn boundaries of these omissions, she is reasonably confident he will be honest with her, at least about the stuff that matters.

That is why, when he comes home very late from a night spent at Salvatore’s discussing the logistics of laundering a sudden glut of ransom money well beyond the scale of their usual business dealings, and she curls around him half-asleep and tucks her nose against the back of his neck, and catches a whiff of something unfamiliar and sandalwood-y, she says nothing of it. It is not, exactly, that she doesn’t notice it, but it seems incidental, not something she needs to bother with assigning meaning to.

Once Leo starts working on the port scheme with Primo, there are a lot of late nights. Sometimes she’ll be dead asleep when he comes home, and he’ll slide into bed without waking her and be snoring softly beside her in the morning. Sometimes she’ll stay up late reading and still be awake when he comes home. He always looks tired on these nights, but satisfied, in a way he never looked coming home from late nights at Salvatore’s. He looks like someone who is building something for the future, something daring and ambitious, instead of just following the same small orders for the same small man over and over again. He’ll climb under the blankets with her and hold her tucked close against him until they fall asleep.

Later, she will fit these details into a different picture. She will think about how easy it is to see the things you expect to see, and dismiss the bits that suggest the possibility of something else entirely, because surely it couldn’t be _that_.

Regina’s aunt Silvia had married a soldier of the local ‘ndrina, a gruff and forbidding man who seemed nothing like Leonardo at all. Regina remembers sitting in Silvia’s kitchen while she rolled out pasta, seventeen and terrified, after the first time Leonardo had told her he wanted to marry her as soon as he got enough money to be on his own.

“I’m in love with him,” she had said. “But I’m afraid.”

“Of course you are. You’re not stupid.” Silvia’s hands, rough from a lifetime of farm labor, had worked the dough without supervision as she spoke.

“How do you do it?”

Silvia had nodded her head toward the open window, where the mountain climbed up into the autumn fog. “You see that mountain? You could spend your whole life chipping away at it and not make a dent. Or you can accept that you live on a mountain. You cut some steps and move on with your life.”

“I’m not sure I understand.”

“The good things, you do whatever it takes to hold on to them. Everything else, you learn to live with it.”

She had nodded, but she still hadn’t really understood, not back then. She had watched Silvia cover bruises with heavy makeup and not understood the calculation she’d made, that you weren’t guaranteed to be safe from that anywhere, and at least this way your children would eat. She hadn’t known, yet, just exactly what things she was capable of learning to live with.

A few months later, they move to Gioia Tauro, home of the port that is Primo’s brainchild and is beginning to feel like Leonardo’s adopted second son.

It’s not exactly the big city, but it’s not the village either. She doesn’t know anyone here. In the village everyone knows everyone’s business in a way that she had always thought was stifling, but this lonely anonymity is worse. It doesn’t help that Primo and Leonardo are always together.

Francesco, at least, makes friends easily at his new school. She becomes casual acquaintances with some of their mothers, sharing a coffee while their sons kick a football around or go wandering through the orchards outside the city. It’s not the same, though. She doesn’t know these people, who they’re loyal to. She has to tell a lot of lies.

She comes to treasure their Sunday trips back to the village, making the rounds after church and lunch to hear the latest gossip and commiserate over the same small-town problems everyone has complained about her whole life. Now that she’s not immersed in them, they seem quaint and charmingly familiar and she can offer a sympathetic ear without it feeling like an inescapable burden. Half the time both Leo and Primo are drunk enough by the end of the day that she ends up driving them home.

It’s on one of these Sundays, an ordinary Sunday, that she ends up with a little spare time in the late afternoon and decides to walk out to their bit of land on the edge of the village. The grapes growing over the trellis by the barn were nearly ripe the last time she checked and she doesn’t want them to go to waste. At the very least she can tell Luisa’s son to pick them when he comes to tend to the sheep and make sure they get made into wine.

She’s near the entrance to the barn when she hears a noise, a short grunt that she probably would have attributed to an animal if she hadn’t heard Leonardo’s voice, soft and low, immediately afterward.

She can’t say what about it makes her freeze just outside the entryway, only that something feels off, wrong, out of place. She stands dead still, pressed against the wood, and hears Leo again. His voice is too quiet to make out the words but sounds breathless and muffled and she can’t say _why_ it fills her with dread but it does.

She reverses course and creeps around the barn to the side with the windows, to the spot where she stood so many times as a helplessly besotted teenager, spying on Leo working in the barn with his shirt off in the summer heat. She’d perfected the art of seeing without being seen, then turning up with a pitcher of something cool to drink at an opportune moment. She peers in from the very edge of the window, and then pulls back immediately, because it’s Leo and Primo.

Leo, with his back against the wall, his face flushed and sweaty, one of his hands buried in Primo’s hair and the other one, unmistakably, down Primo’s pants. Primo, his face tucked against Leo’s neck, his shoulders heaving, the jacket of his sharp Sunday suit tossed over a chair at the worktable.

It’s a warm afternoon, but she feels like she just slipped into an ice-cold mountain pool, the kind where the water is so frigid you feel like you can’t breathe right.

She doesn’t need to see anything more, but she’s frozen against the window now, trapped in a movie that won’t stop playing. And so she does see. Leo brushing a damp strand of hair off Primo’s cheek. Primo whispering something in Leo’s ear that makes him smile that soft secret little smile that up until this exact moment she had thought of as _her_ smile. Leo fishing in his pocket for a handkerchief to wipe his hand, and Primo buttoning up his pants for him, and Leo straightening Primo’s tie, and then biting his mouth when he leans in for a hungry, desperate kiss.

It is so much worse than catching them in some obscene position would have been. Because Leo looks _fond,_ and he touches Primo like he’s _familiar,_ and they tidy up each other’s clothes and hair like this is not the first time they have hidden this, and that’s what makes her feel like she’s drowning.

She is finally able to peel herself away from the window, and she leans against the barn wall, both hands clamped over her mouth so she doesn’t scream, or cry, or both. She might have stood there forever, except Primo and Leo are coming out of the barn, and she is suddenly terrified at the thought of them catching her here. ( _He wouldn’t hurt me,_ the rational part of her brain thinks. _Leo would never let him._ But the fear is there anyway.)

She hides, crouching out of sight behind the chicken coop, and watches Primo and Leo head down the road back toward the center of the village, looking like two close colleagues in a criminal enterprise and nothing more.

Later, she meets them outside the bar, at the time they’d agreed upon, as if nothing has happened. They’ve both gotten drunker over the past few hours. Leo has color in his cheeks, the collar of his shirt unbuttoned, his tie tucked away somewhere (perhaps stuffed in the same pocket as a handkerchief stiff with Primo’s come; she doesn’t _want_ to be having that thought but here we are). He puts an arm around her waist and leans his head on her shoulder as they walk back to the car, and she has to let him, _she has to,_ because she cannot let them know that she knows; she hasn’t figured out what to do yet.

“I’m driving,” she says when they are all assembled at the car. “Francesco, get in the front with me.” Francesco has gotten the knees of his trousers muddy, _again,_ and it’s such a normal, mundane detail grating against the feeling of her entire world sliding off a cliff that it makes her want to scream.

In the car, Leo falls asleep almost instantly, head lolling against the seat back and mouth slightly open. Francesco nods off too, leaning against the window, tired out from scrambling around mountains with his village friends.

At some point, she realizes Primo is watching her from the back seat. He is sitting dead still, one arm stretched out along the seat back, his hand close enough to Leo’s sleep-soft face that he could reach out and stroke his cheek, if he wanted to. Night has fallen, and there’s barely enough moonlight to see his face, but every time she looks in the rearview mirror his eyes are on her.

Does he know that she knows? Is it written all over her face? Is he waiting for a tell, a change in her behavior, waiting to see what reaction she’ll have before he decides whether he needs to do something about it?

She knows that she’s not literally alone; Leo and Francesco are right there in the car with her, but it _feels_ like she’s alone. Alone, in the dark, on a twisting, narrow mountain road, with the most dangerous man in Calabria, a man who she has just this afternoon discovered is fucking her husband.

By the time she drops Primo off, at the little house high on the hill that she has never seen the inside of, her hands are aching from how hard she’s been clenching the wheel.

She keeps it together through breakfast the next morning, until Francesco leaves for school and Leonardo goes to work, with Primo, in their makeshift office in a trailer at the port-to-be.

While she’s washing the breakfast dishes, her composure cracks. She starts sobbing in great huge gasps, hands braced on the edge of the sink full of soapy water. She stumbles over to collapse at the kitchen table and buries her face in a dishtowel to keep the neighbors from hearing while she lets out heaving, racking cries.

She lets out what she needs to let out, the unbearable buildup of fear and hurt and confusion and loneliness, and then she makes herself stop. She takes a lot of deep, slow breaths, until her chest isn’t hitching on every inhale anymore. She wets the dish towel and presses cold water over her face, to keep her eyes from puffing up too much. She goes to the bedroom and gets the pack of cigarettes she keeps in the bedside table, for the rare times she really needs one. She smokes one, slowly, and makes herself calm down.

She has to think. Because she can’t un-know what she knows, and now that she knows, she needs a plan.

She had tried to prepare herself for a lot of things, with Leo. She had worried about him getting killed, about him getting arrested, about his work putting her and Francesco in danger. She had tucked an envelope of money in the back of a drawer in case they needed to run somewhere quickly. She had practiced with him what to do if someone was in the house trying to hurt them. She had made him teach her how to shoot a gun, first the revolver he kept in the bedside drawer, then the heavy shotgun he kept in the wardrobe. Made him take her up into the woods and set up makeshift targets and practice until she was reasonably confident that if a time came when she needed to do it, she wouldn’t miss.

 _My husband is a homosexual and he’s fucking the local don_ had not been on her list of potential worries.

It’s a lot of blows to her worldview all at once, the _gay_ part and the _cheating_ part and the _Primo_ part all tangled up together. She lights another cigarette. _One piece at a time,_ she thinks.

So. Leo desires men. Or at least does not only desire women. It’s a shock, for sure. She knows she’s supposed to be disgusted, or concerned for his immortal soul. But. Well. Being married to a criminal, you learn to sustain a certain amount of cognitive dissonance about things like _sin._ She’s pretty sure the Bible has some things to say about murder and kidnapping and extortion, too, and if she’s stuck with him through all that, it seems a bit absurd to draw the line at _this._

Strangely, what hurts the most is that he never told her. She would have kept his secret, the way she has kept all the others. He must know that. It aches, that he would think he had to conceal this bit of himself from her when she has not judged him for anything else.

As for Primo…well. There had been whispers about Primo for a long time. How he never has a girlfriend, and seems to have no interest in any of the women who are bold enough to flirt with him. How there is something _off_ about him, although no one seems to be able to put their finger on exactly what it is—the way he dresses or the way he carries himself or the way he always seems to prefer his hair too long for the style of the time, or some other unidentifiable quality. There are things about him that nobody quite wants to say but you can tell people _think._ They probably would say them, if Primo had put less work into making sure everyone around him knows what a suicidal decision that would be.

She remembers Primo, sitting at their dining room table at maybe fifteen, picking at a spot of dried pasta sauce on the tablecloth and sneaking glances at Leo while Leo reviewed his notes for the accountancy licensure exam. Primo still had a healing split lip and a ghost of a bruise on his jaw, from the fights he was always getting into at school or from talking back to Salvatore; both were equally likely possibilities.

“What are you doing?” Primo had asked.

“Studying.”

“For what?”

“I’m taking an exam. To get an accountancy license.” Salvatore didn’t care whether he had a license, of course, but he’d been doing the books for years and he was good at it, so why not get a little legitimate business now and then?

Something on Primo’s face had darkened at that. “Does that mean you’re going to get a fancy job and move away?”

Leo had looked up at that. “No. Of course not. I’m going to work for Salvatore.”

It had made her heart ache, the way Primo’s face had lit up at that. “Oh,” he said. “Me too.” He had puffed up with teenage bravado. “I can be your backup.”

It was childish infatuation, she had told herself at the time, a fixation on the one adult man in his life who treated him kindly. She remembers Primo copying the way Leo held his cigarette, the way he rolled up the sleeves of his white undershirt. Primo hanging around the barn (the way she had hung around the barn just a few years earlier). Primo offering to help Leo with the sheep. The way Primo’s face looked when Leo smiled at him or praised him for something.

She is fitting the information into a different pattern now, a pattern that says _crush,_ and in retrospect it’s so _obvious._ If Primo were a woman she would have recognized it ages ago.

Of course, if Primo were a woman none of them would be where they are now.

When, she wonders, had Leo stopped seeing him as a child—a child who had been forced to grow up too fast, but still a child—and started seeing him as a man, a man he was attracted to? How long, exactly, had this been going on, unseen because she never would have thought to look for it?

She had, briefly, considered the idea that this was something Primo was making Leo do. But she can’t convince herself of that. Because the image of them together is burned in her memory, and there was nothing in Leo’s body language to suggest that the situation was anything but wanted.

And that is the very worst bit, isn’t it?

It seems like such a stupid, selfish thing to be upset about, when she should be worrying about her marriage and her family and the fact that her husband is having an affair with the single most dangerous person they know. But…Leo had always made her feel wanted. He had made her feel _sexy._ He was so handsome, as a young man—he is still handsome, but he’d been the guy all the village girls had swooned over. And he had picked _her,_ a goat farmer’s daughter with unruly hair and dirt permanently ground under her fingernails. And he had convinced her that he’d wanted her, when she was young and slim, and when she was forty with stretch marks and strands of gray in her hair; when she was so pregnant she pissed herself if she laughed at a joke; when her breasts leaked milk through every nightshirt she owned. (And before that, too, when her cursed womb could do nothing but miscarry.) He had convinced her that he desired her and her alone, and always would, and she’d believed him. And now she doesn’t know whether it was all a lie. 

Had he been thinking about men, all those times he’d fucked her? Had he been thinking about _Primo?_

She feels so _stupid,_ for having secretly gloated all these years, thinking she’d gotten a good one. A loyal husband and a loving father. A man who against all odds had held on to his kindness, who hadn’t let the world they lived in turn him cruel, who hadn’t grown too fond of having power over others or too bitter at what he didn’t have to not take it out on those around him. Someone who treated her like a partner instead of a servant, who listened, who cared about her opinion and paid attention to her feelings.

She should have known it was too good to be true.

She sees all the logical paths laid out before her, now that she knows, and she hates them all. She sees the path where she says nothing, and pretends she knows nothing, and they never talk about it, and she spends the rest of their life together slowly letting the bitterness seep between them.

She doesn’t think she could bear that, for herself or for Leo.

She sees the path where she says nothing, and Primo slowly pulls Leo away from her, and probably Francesco too, with time. Oh, they’d still be married, of course. But she’d watch their life together hollow out, watch him grow cold to her, watch him gradually close off more and more of himself from her. Maybe Primo wouldn’t even mean to do it, but his gravity would pull Leo in.

She cannot let that happen.

She sees the path where she forces Leo to choose, and that one scares her most of all. Because he would choose her. She is certain of it. And he would say he didn’t resent it, but he would.

And Primo… For so long, Primo has had no one. Now he has someone. She shudders to think what he would do if she tried to take that away.

She doesn’t think he would kill her, although she’s not fool enough to discount that possibility entirely. But he’d find a way to hurt her, irrevocably, through Leo or through Francesco.

It’s a strange and terrifying sort of power, knowing that she could destroy them all.

No, Primo is not getting pried out of their lives so easily now that he’s inserted himself into her marriage. When Primo wants something, he takes it, and woe to anyone who gets in his way.

And…there is something else, something that twists like a knife in her gut every time she thinks about it. She can’t help replaying their faces in the barn, Leo’s clandestine little smile and Primo’s…well, nothing really ever looks _soft_ about him, but there was something about the way his gaze lingered on Leo’s hands and Leo’s face while he fussed with Primo’s clothes, an intensity that was different than all the other intensities she had seen on him.

They hadn’t just looked like they wanted to fuck each other. They had looked like they _liked_ each other. Maybe even like they loved each other.

She is never going to win against that. 

Not by fighting it, anyway. And certainly not by fighting Primo. No…she has to find some way to outmaneuver him. She just has no idea how.

Leo comes home just before dinner. By then she has smoked five cigarettes, but she’s composed herself and made sure her face isn’t puffy and her makeup isn’t smudged. She’s sucked on a mint and dabbed a bit of perfume to cover the cigarette smell, because he _knows_ she only smokes when she’s nervous about something. Given that Leo drinks most of a bottle of wine at dinner, he probably doesn’t notice.

She can tell as soon as he slides into bed next to her that he wants to have sex. He’s the kind of drunk she usually enjoys, enough to be loose and relaxed and amorous, but not enough to be sloppy or fall asleep halfway through. He curls around her from behind, smoothing her hair aside to kiss the back of her neck, the curve of her shoulder, pressed against her warm and familiar and already a little bit hard.

She thinks about saying no. He has always listened when she’s said no. Even when it was for months at a time, in the worst depths of despair after the third and fourth miscarriages, when she could barely stand to be touched without crying. He had been so patient with her. ( _Had he, though?_ she has to wonder now. _Or had he been with someone else?_ ) He had listened, after Francesco was born, when she had said in no uncertain terms that she was never getting pregnant again. She had started tracking her cycle assiduously in a little calendar she kept in the bedside drawer, and they had learned to enjoy other things at certain times of the month (and, goddammit, now she has a whole _other_ set of questions about how he got so good at some of those things too).

She could say no, and he would listen. But…she doesn’t want to. She rolls over to face him, lets him kiss her, soft and deep, lets him touch her, his thumb teasing her nipple to hardness through the thin fabric of her nightgown. She lets him tug aside clothes and slide into her, her hands on the warm skin of his back as he rocks into her, tracing the planes of the body she knows so well, even if it’s grown a bit softer with time.

“Can I?” he breathes against her neck when he’s close to finishing. He still asks. She is almost completely sure she is too old to get pregnant, now, but he still asks.

She nods, her cheek against his temple, because if she tries to say anything the tears will spill over. A few breaths later she feels him release inside her with a soft groan.

She lets him lie heavily on top of her afterward, a warm, familiar weight, her fingers twined into the curls at the base of his skull. After a moment he sits up on one elbow so he can look at her.

“I love you.”

She makes herself smile. “What’s this about?”

She thinks she sees a twinge of sadness, before he covers it up. “Don’t tell you often enough. That’s all.” He strokes her cheek and gives her the softest kiss, like she is still precious, after all these years.

She is not giving him up. She is not. She will figure something out.

Over the next few weeks, she watches. And she starts to see it, when Leo has been with Primo. It’s like a subtle pattern woven into fabric, invisible at first but unmistakable once the eye catches it. It’s in the way he’ll come home and the line of his shoulder has relaxed just the tiniest bit. It’s a flush in his cheeks and a certain light in his eyes. His hair not quite put back into the order it was this morning. Maybe someone who hadn’t been married to Leo for nearly twenty years wouldn’t notice any of these things. But she does.

She thought, maybe, she’d get used to it. But the longer it goes on, the more she feels Primo as an unspoken, disconcerting presence between them. There are nights he comes home hungry for her, and she cannot help but wonder if he really wants Primo instead. ( _Were you just planning to lie to me forever about this?_ she wonders.) Once, when he comes in very late, she pretends to be asleep, and she can hear him quietly getting himself off in the bed next to her. She sees the way Leo looks at Primo over Sunday lunch, in the moments when Primo can’t catch him watching. She sees it because she _recognizes_ it. Maybe Leo is able to hide it from everybody else, but not from her.

It’s at one of these Sunday lunches that a man approaches their table. She thinks she recognizes him as one of Donatella Pellicori’s many sons, but they live high up in the hills outside the village, in a rugged little house surrounded by bergamot orchards, and she doesn’t see them often.

“Don Primo…” the man begins, his hat in his hands. She can feel Leo tense up next to her in the booth, because it is well established by now that you do not interrupt the don’s lunch to ask for favors; that is what Primo and Leo’s long afternoons at the bar are for. (Although…now she knows that is not _only_ what they’re for.)

Leo is on edge beside her, expecting violence, but Primo holds up a subtle hand in his direction without taking his gaze off the unlucky fool who’s interrupted his meal. He unfolds himself from the booth and directs the man over to the bar, where they have a quiet conversation out of earshot. The man (Vito, she is fairly sure this one is Vito) keeps worrying his hat between his hands, while Primo leans against the bar, performatively relaxed, his hip cocked at an absurd angle that pulls his already-tight trousers tighter over the curve of his ass. He is so different in presence from Salvatore, holding court in the village square with his jacket draped over his shoulders like a king’s robe. Different, but somehow just as scary. If not more so.

Leo is watching the scene at the bar, the tension in his body mostly nerves, but also a tiny bit something else. It occurs to her that Primo is standing _like that_ on purpose, to catch Leo’s attention, and is perfectly aware that it’s working. Of course he would make a performance of it.

Eventually, the man leaves and Primo comes back to the table. “What did he want?” Francesco asks as Primo sits down again.

There is a way that Primo turns his whole attention to Francesco when he asks a question like that, and it’s unsettling, in the way that the full weight of Primo’s attention usually is, but it’s not the way he looks at someone when he’s trying to scare them, or about to hurt them. She hasn’t quite figured out how she feels about it.

“He has a problem that he needs solved,” Primo says.

“And can you solve it for him?”

“Of course.” Primo flashes that shark smile of his. “For a price.”

“So…now he owes you.”

“He is _happy_ to owe me. Because I can give him what he wants, when no one else can. That’s how you make people love you.”

 _So that’s what Primo thinks love is,_ she thinks, and it makes her a little bit sad. But it also gives her the germ of an idea.

She lies awake late that night, long after Leo falls asleep snoring gently against her shoulder, turning over the mad scrap of an idea in her head.

You didn’t live your whole life surrounded by violent men without learning to think like them, at least a little. The women who survived, who didn’t get ground down into nothing, were the ones who managed to be just as crafty as them, twice as clever and three times as tough. You couldn’t be like them, but you learned how to walk into a room and not show fear. You learned how to hold your own.

She’d been going about this all wrong, she thinks as she stares up at the ceiling. The way to keep Leo close to her is not to focus on what she wants, but on what _Leo_ wants. And she already knows what Leo wants more than anything in the world. He wants Francesco not to grow up to be someone like him, making deals with someone like Primo.

Leo is still convinced Francesco is going to go away to university—even more convinced, now, with the promise of the port. Regina is not so sure. From what she has seen, Primo is doing everything he can to pull Francesco in the exact opposite direction, and it is working. Francesco is in awe of Primo, enthralled with that stupid fascination boys have with a life of violence, before they understand the cost. And Primo scoffs at formal education, the way he mocks everything he never had a shot at. 

She doesn’t think Leo will be able to compel Francesco to do anything, when the time comes. And she knows which way Primo will push him. But she sees a way—maybe—that she can get something from Primo that Leo cannot, something that Leo desperately wants.

And the thing is…she thinks she is also starting to understand what Primo wants. The want underneath all the other, obvious wants, for money and power and respect and attention. The thing he would never admit to wanting.

She had seen Primo’s face, at the confirmation banquet table, when Salvatore had handed Francesco the knife. She had seen it and been _terrified_ that Primo would kill them all. He could have, for daring to take what should by all rights be his. It would have almost felt like fate, the preordained ending of some tragic opera, the scorned heir turning his wrath on the next generation and leaving the dynasty in ruins.

But he hadn’t done that. Ever since the horrid...ear business, Primo has treated Francesco with what she has been forced to conclude is his attempt at affection. Letting him hang around the port and explaining things to him, both the smuggling and the legitimate side of the business, which Primo knows a startling amount about. Listening to Francesco talk over lunches and dinners and remembering things he’s said, bringing them back weeks later in a way that always makes Francesco’s face light up. It’s painful, sometimes, to see how nakedly Primo watches and copies how Leo interacts with Francesco, because he has no other experience to draw on. His idea of caretaking may still be a bit warped, but it’s so unexpected to see him _try._

“That’s the thing about Primo,” Leo had said to her once. “No one ever expects anything of him. That’s how he fools them all.”

She thinks over all of these things, late at night with Leo sleeping soundly beside her, and she slowly begins to pull them together into a plan. It might be an insane plan, but…well, she is out of other ideas at this point.

Primo thinks in deals, right? So she’ll make one.

Leo is so stunned, when she finally confronts him and doesn’t say any of the things he would have expected her to say. And he is so relieved, shaking in her arms as he kisses her. It’s so _confusing._ She is still hurt, and sad, and angry, but…she had always wanted to be a safe place for him, no matter what. And it has felt so _wrong_ this whole time, to know he is hiding things from her. And if this is the only way she can think of to make it right…well. She’ll learn to live with it.

Primo is _furious._ She’s trapped him, and she can see his mind clicking through possible escape routes and discarding them with mounting rage. He _hates_ that she has outmaneuvered him, that she has backed him into a corner so effectively not by fighting him, but by asking him to be better, to do better, to treat her son like a person with his own wants and needs, not a soldier in waiting or a pawn in some succession game played by men who will never feel the consequences. To make sure Francesco is cared for and protected in the way he never was.

He hates it, that she has guessed correctly, how badly he wants even one person in his life to not be disappointed in him.

She holds her breath. Waiting for him to call her bluff, to say that she has no power over him and he’ll do whatever he damn well wants. And he could, easily. He could kill her right now and take everything he wants. He could blow this whole thing up rather than relinquish any control. It’s what every other person who knows him would expect him to do.

 _Prove them all wrong,_ she thinks desperately in Primo’s direction, and she hopes, and she prays, that she’s right about how much he wants to.

“Deal,” Primo says, with so little fanfare that for a second she thinks she imagined it. He leans forward, elbows on the table; the terrifying stillness gone from his body like it was never there.

Leo looks roughly like he’s just watched his life flash before his eyes.

Now that it’s over, she can feel herself vibrating with adrenaline. Fuck, she needs a drink. And maybe a cigarette. She thinks there are two left in her pack in the bedside drawer. Maybe she’ll offer one to Primo, just to see how he reacts.

She raises her glass, mirroring Primo. She still wouldn’t say she _trusts_ him, not really, but she’s confident she has at least earned his grudging respect. Enough, at least, to be invited to share a drink with her husband and her husband’s lover, the most dangerous man in Calabria.

**Author's Note:**

> Come say hi on [Tumblr!](http://fuckyeahisawthat.tumblr.com/)


End file.
